Michael Phelps starts the men's 4x200 freestyle relay at the Pan Pacific Swimming Championships in August of 2010 in Irvine, Calif. Team USA won the event.

That means world records won't fall at a breakneck pace (43 were set at the 2009 worlds), unknown swimmers are less likely to topple the sport's royalty (as German Paul Biedermann did in 2009, soundly beating U.S. superstar Michael Phelps in the 200-meter freestyle) and swimmers won't need special handwear just to get into their full-body, sausage-casing suits.

"We found the best thing was kitchen gloves, because they stuck to the nylon, more or less, so you could grip it. If you did it without, (your fingers) would just be bleeding," reigning Olympic 200-meter breaststroke champion Rebecca Soni says.

Yet for all the havoc wreaked by the friction-reducing, buoyancy-enhancing polyurethane suits, U.S. swimmers and coaches now have some kind words for what they call "technical suits," saying they raised the bar on what times are possible and provided a guide on how to swim faster.

Partly because of those effects, they predict at least a few world records will be set at the 2011 worlds.

"You'll still see records broken," says Phelps, who at the 2009 worlds stuck with a 2008 model suit with polyurethane panels covering about 50% of its surface out of sponsor loyalty.

Says Phelps' coach, Bob Bowman: "One thing the tech suits did do was set people's minds on certain times, and that's still there."

After an outcry at the 2009 worlds, FINA, swimming's international governing body, banned technical suits from competition as of Jan.1, 2010. Suits now must be made fully of textile material. Men's suits cannot extend past the navel or knees; women's suits can't go past the knees or cover the neck or shoulders.

In the what-is-old-is-new-again suits, Phelps says, "Swimming is actually swimming."

"If you don't work hard, you're clearly not going to do anything," he says.

The technical suits helped point swimmers and their coaches toward the work, as well as the kind of core strength and lean physique, that is most effective in improving times.

"The underwater work has to really be a focus now because the suits almost did it for you before," Bowman says of the distance that swimmers got off their starts and turns while wearing technical suits.

"Now you really have to be in shape to stay under water, to do the motion, do it quickly and to build into your lap."

One of the biggest advantages of technical suits was that they allowed them to float near the top of the water, where they felt less churn from their own strokes and from those of the swimmers in adjacent lanes.

"It felt like you were always swimming downhill," U.S. swimmer Ryan Lochte says.

Getting that sensation in practice could boost a flagging swimmer, so coaches sometimes would encourage them to put on a technical suit for training. That taught coaches about prime positioning for their swimmers as they raced.

"We learned from watching the line and different body positions and how people go," says Frank Busch, USA Swimming's national team director.

Lochte is the only swimmer to break individual world records since technical suits were banned. He set new marks in the 200 and 400 IM at last year's short-course world championships (held in a 25-meter, rather than a 50-meter, Olympic-sized pool).

Lochte's coach, Gregg Troy, says Lochte made the transition more easily because "we never became suit dependent. We didn't wear them as often as everyone else."

The same could be said for Soni, who came within a half second of reclaiming her world record in the 200 breaststroke last year (now at 2minutes, 20.12 seconds).

"For a little while, people thought there was no way anyone will swim as fast as they did with suits on," Soni says. "Then, after a while, they're like, 'OK, that's kind of putting yourself down. Why bother?' I never really thought that."

Which could make her all the rage next week in Shanghai.

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